What Assistly did wrong launching Desk.com

http://cosupport.us/2012/01/604/

by hajrice • 14 years ago

18 12 14 years ago

hajrice• 14 years ago

Just wanted to let you guys know, Helpjuice.com is an alternative that a good amount of (former) Assistly customers have been switching to

tty0pts2• 14 years ago

Really like who?

foobarbazetc• 14 years ago

Good luck getting an answer to that one. :)

melvinram• 14 years ago

I don't get it. They rebranded and didn't tell partners and customers that it was coming... so you leave the partnership?

I'm sure I'm missing something. Is the product no longer as great as it used to be? Is the profits/commissions you'd earn no longer as great? Is the support no longer the same?

sarahhatter• 14 years ago

I never got commission or any sort of profit or pay for being an Assistly partner. I did it because I enjoyed the product, but at this point the company itself can't be trusted to have their customer's best interest in mind.

And yes, the product is no longer as great.

18pfsmt• 14 years ago

By the looks of it (from the perspective of people not involved in the support industry), you appear to have a problem with the company for making a name change, which seems petty (going by the comments here, and my own thoughts after reading your post). If you were to have outlined the product differences before/ after, and why the changes made rendered the product inferior, you would probably have more support.

As it stands, to me at least, it looks like you were simply looking for an excuse, and a re-branding simply provided what you thought was an adequate excuse (and the HN community disagrees).

I think it is important to keep in mind that Salesforce is a ~$15B company, and sending 20 customers their way probably doesn't constitute a strategic partner to an organization of that size.

tty0pts2• 14 years ago

Can you list what parts of the product that are different and worse than it was yesterday? I have been evaluating Assistly for the last 2 weeks for my company and today I hardly noticed any change at all. Actually I kind of prefer the more muted color scheme, the new white space in the open cases and a few other smaller things. These appear to be the biggest change.

Perhaps I am not using all the features you use to notice the difference, but the Agent and Admin sections of the site appear identical functionality-wise to me, just slightly different color scheme, visual cues and the new Desk.com logo. I did prefer the old logo though!:)

It might be helpful to elaborate on how the functionality or usability has altered today since the rebrand to give others evaluating these types of products more information.

armandososa• 14 years ago

I don't get it either. There's absolutely no mention about the product's quality, all I can see is whining about not liking changes.

I'm not a power user by any means, but today I've been able to do my support shift without any change at all. Even the old *.assistly.com urls work as always, they don't even redirect. The GUI received a facelift but it's hard to say that it's worse than before.

And what's all that about Assistly not existing anymore and Desk.com being a new product with hours of existence?

I mean, this is not even a consumer product, it is for people who do support for a living. If this girl can't wrap her minds about a product changing their name while still being the same product then I don't want them supporting me. Ever.

ninjastar99• 14 years ago

I'm confused. Didn't they just change the name and update their design? As long as the features are the same, I don't care too much if they call it Assistly or Superchefbobbyflay. As far as I've seen, the features are all still there, they just updated their design and name. A quick heads up would have been nice, but this doesn't enter FCP X territory or even the continent of Netflix. I thought your example there was a bit over the top. Netflix changed their entire business model. Assistly updated their name and design. Am I wrong? Disclosure: I don't even use Assistly - I use Zendesk. But I respect what they're doing.

Lazare• 14 years ago

This rant makes...no sense. A good uptime record means nothing if you change your product name? What? And even if you accept all the complaints at face value - they claim that it would all have been okay if they'd just been warned the day before? How does that work?

Either they just killed their old product and launched a completely new one with no track record and history, OR it's just a rebranding of an existing product. If it's the former, a heads up about their plans would solve absolutely, precisely, nothing. It's still a new product which cosupport.us claims they can't afford to be associated with. If it's the latter, then there's no problem.

So which is it? After waffling back and forth, cosupport.us eventually concludes with saying that they'd have been okay if they'd been warned, and that they hope that their new partner "[isn't] in the business of rebranding or renaming themselves without notice."

But why would you care if a product is renamed themselves without notice? cosupport.us doesn't say - all the complaints earlier in the rant were very specifically about why it was terrible for Assistly to launch a new product.

Look - I know nothing about Assistly or cosupport.us, but this rant reeks of entitlement. Clearly cusupport.us is upset, and I'm prepared to believe that cosupport.us may have a great case and a legitmate complaint! But I don't think this rant is doing is communicating it, nor is it doing them any favours.

abray• 14 years ago

What a lot of drama over a product that has the same features today that it had yesterday. I like the redesign and it has not affected my workflow at all

AndrewWarner• 14 years ago

I was shocked by the name change, but we haven't been impacted. I'm not even sure if my team noticed the change.

What Assistly did wrong launching Desk.com

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